Heroic success

How should opera, and particular operas, be made ‘relevant’? And what kind of relevance, anyway, should they try to achieve? The questions are too big to answer in a brief review, but Birmingham Opera Company’s largely magnificent production of Monteverdi’s Il Ritorno d’Ulisse in Patria heroically attempts to cope with them. Using the highly individual space of Planet Ice, they divide the building down the middle with a floor-to-ceiling wire fence with a few doors in it, and for the 110-minute-long Act I have the audience standing on one side, while the performers appear at various points on either side, and assorted people, including some audience members, have light shone in their faces and are pushed through gates, etc., thus imbuing us with some sense of what it is like to be a refugee or asylum seeker — and providing us with an experience which is related to that of Ulysses in the opera.